Paul Kirschner,

Universiteit Utrecht, Postbus 80140. 3508 TC Utrecht, Netherlands

Maaike Hendriks

Abstract

Making educational materials freely available on the web can be seen as a noble enterprise in itself but as a way to address the call for people to become lifelong learners. The world is rapidly changing, requiring us to continuously update our knowledge and skills. A problem with this approach to lifelong learning is that the free materials that are made available are often both incomplete and unsuitable for independent learning in an online setting. The OpenER (Open Educational Resources) project at the Open Universiteit Nederland makes more than 20 short courses, originally developed for independent-study, freely available from the website www.opener.ou.nl. For our research we start from an envisioned online learning environment now under development. We then apply backcasting to select research topics and experiments that form steps from the current to the ultimate situation. This paper reports on two experiments that are an extension to standard forum software and the use of student notes to annotate learning materials: two small steps towards our ultimate open learning environment.

Abstract: Making educational materials freely available
on the web can be seen as a noble enterprise in itself but as a way
to address the call for people to become lifelong learners. The
world is rapidly changing, requiring us to continuously update our
knowledge and skills. A problem with this approach to lifelong
learning is that the free materials that are made available are
often both incomplete and unsuitable for independent learning in an
online setting. The OpenER (Open Educational Resources) project at
the Open Universiteit Nederland makes more than 20 short courses,
originally developed for independent-study, freely available from
the website www.opener.ou.nl. For our research
we start from an envisioned online learning environment now under
development. We then apply backcasting to select research topics
and experiments that form steps from the current to the ultimate
situation. This paper reports on two experiments that are an
extension to standard forum software and the use of student notes
to annotate learning materials: two small steps towards our
ultimate open learning environment.

1 Current situation

Traditional educational resources that were originally used in
face-to-face, traditional educational settings (e.g., lectures,
lecture notes, syllabi presentations, computer simulations or
animations, et cetera) are increasingly being recycled into
open educational resources (OERs) freely available on the web.
Unfortunately, open educational resources can be nothing more than
the name implies: freely available resources then can be
used for education. More is needed to make them truly
ÒeducationalÓ. Education involves different forms of
student-teacher or student-student interaction and not just
student-resource interaction. Most current OERs have been
supplemented with tools such as online forums to allow for
student-student interactions, but it is unclear if that has really
worked. The following scenarios sketch the typical hurdles for an
online learner making use of OERs.

1.1 Scenario: Carol in 2008

To improve her IT-skills for her work, Carol has chosen to make
use of Initial programming in Java, an OER that she found
while surfing the web. This OER contains not only the course
materials, but also a discussion board / forum for those making use
of the materials. While working on assignment 2.2, she cannot get
the Java program running. Neither the text accompanying the
assignment nor the solution at the chapterÕs end helps.
Carol decides to pose the problem on the courseÕs online
forum. After several clicks (open a new browser, click a URL for
the domain of study (informatics/computer science), click on the
course she is following, click on the year that the course is being
given since it has had a number of iterations at the university in
which it was given, et cetera) sheÕs finally there.
Unfortunately, the two questions she posted previously were still
not answered and only 5 visitors had even taken the time to look at
her questions. Carol hesitates: ÔWhatÕs the
use?Õ Since she has no alternative, she starts:
ÒQuestion 2.6 in chapter 2.2 in Initial Programming in Java
gives a solution different from mine and I canÕt find my
mistake. My solution isÉÓ. After posting this, she
clicks around to the other posts on other courses. She finds a nice
applet on another site illustrating some programming concepts in
the course and wants to share this, but because of the low number
of visitors she sees no use in sharing this knowledge. Carol is
disappointed. Learning should be more than reading. She decides to
ask a colleague at work the next day for help, but for now
sheÕs stuck and cannot proceed.

This scenario illustrates the following learner hurdles:

á Several clicks are needed to reach the forum. Carol
has to leave her learning context and go to a series of new
environments (domain catalogue, course forum). She also needs to
toggle between screens / frames in order to cut and paste her
solution in her posting on the forum.

á There are few visitors to the forum and therefore,
not a very good chance that her questions will be answered. This
discourages both knowledge seeking and knowledge sharing.

á Because the question context is not present, it has
to be formulated in the question, leading to cumbersome
formulations and browsing between forum and learning material and
back. Probably, the forum is unformatted text, so this makes
posting a computer program even harder!

These learner hurdles lie partly in the world of usability and
interface design, but also in the greatly increased transaction
costs involved in studying in this way (Ciborra & Olson, 1988).
Though originally coined in economics as those - often not very
visible - costs incurred in making an economic exchange. In
education, and especially in collaborative learning situations and
ICT-use situations, transaction costs may either hamper working
together (i.e., it can be more inefficient to work together than to
work alone; Kirschner, Paas, & Kirschner, In press) or impede
the use of ICT (i.e., due to the time that is wasted on inefficient
actions and moves).

1.2 Scenario: Bob in 2008

Bob is a judicial advisor in local government. The city is
considering new environmental ordinances, but Bob - though a law
expert - feels he needs to become aware of the environmental and
ethical implications of those ordinances. After a long and tedious
search on the internet he finds an OER from a world renowned
university, materials from a course on civil society and the
environment. There are many interesting literature references, but
unfortunately only a few are directly available online. Then he
finds an assignment that uses a case very similar to his working
situation, but unfortunately it is designed as a group assignment.
How is he to find some learners to work on the case? Bob returns to
the starting page of the course and clicks on the forum link
provided. He finds only a small number of messages in the forum and
only 50% have at least one response. He starts writing anyway.
ÒI am BobÉ is anybody interested in working on the
assignment aboutÉ..Ó. After submitting the message he
closes the browser and never returns to the forum again.

This scenario illustrates the following additional learner
hurdles:

á not all learning materials referred to in the OER
are available online;

á open educational resources are hard to find.
There exist local repositories, but there is not yet a global
search engine available to find appropriate materials.

á not only the teachers are absent but also fellow
learners are difficult to contact;

á no easy to use tools are made available for
working together on problems;

2 Ultimate situation

To sketch an ultimate situation where the hurdles of the current
situation are not present, letÕs see where Carol is in 10
years.

2.1 Scenario: Carol in 2018

To improve her IT-skills for her work, Carol has chosen to make
use of Initial programming in Java, an OER that she found
while surfing the web. While working on assignment 2.2, she cannot
get the Java program running. Looking at the solution (one click
away as a popup next to her solution) she doesnÕt see her
mistake. Several visitors before her who also had the same or a
similar problem left notes on their problem and assumptions about
what the source of the problem might be. Reading the notes, she
gets an idea about what went wrong, but wants to check this. An
awareness widget on the screen shows that six peers who have
indicated they have studied the course and are willing to assist
others are online at that moment. Carol connects to one of them
(the one who has been rated as an expert by others) and shares her
idea with her. During the discussion, they come up with an
alternative solution which Carol tries out and which works well.
They immediately post this at the relevant place for other learners
as well as for the authors so that the OER can be improved.

Here, the hurdles are gone and we now see that:

á There is an environment - an open online
learning-community - where learning takes place through interaction
with others;

á The environment provides one-click-access to all
knowledge resources needed, both material and human;

á There is no distinction between different types of
resources;

á All combinations of same/different place/time
communication are supported;

á The additional effort needed to interact with the
environment is minimal and no longer interferes with learning;

á Participation is obvious, unimpeded, simple, and
does not need stimulation.

2.2 Scenario: Bob in 2018

Bob has just updated his blog. Via a RSS-feed he is alerted to
the fact that the city has just launched a new project having both
judicial and environmental issues and Bob muses about the problem
of lack of knowledge about environmental issues involved on his
blog. Within an hour a visitor of his blog, alerted by his own
RSS-feed, provides him with a link to a freely available course on
just these kinds of problems. For some weeks he works on the course
every now and then. At a certain moment he starts an assignment
which resembles the current project he works on. He has to work on
the assignment with another student. He sees that five other
students also want to start the assignment. Bob browses through
their blogs and sees one of them is a biologist from India with a
job very similar to his own. He invites Tilak to work with him and
receives a reply within minutesÉ

In addition to the previous advantages, this scenario shows
that:

á Relevant open educational resources can be found
easily.

á Through blogs and feeds, seamless and effortless
contact with others is achieved.

3 Route to the ultimate situation

To overcome the limits of present technology and theories as
well as the fact that upcoming - possibly dominant - trends are not
predictable, backcasting from the ultimate situation to develop
what is currently possible is a good way to begin.
Backcasting(Holmberg & Robrt, 2000) is Òa method
in which the future desired conditions are envisioned and steps are
then defined to attain those conditions, rather than taking steps
that are merely a continuation of present methods extrapolated into
the futureÓ (p. 294). According to Dreborg (1996)
backcasting is particularly useful when the problem that is to be
studied is complex, there is a need for major change, the dominant
trends are not the solution to the problem, but rather are part of
the problem itself, the problem itself is influenced by many
factors external to the problem, and the scope of the problem is so
broad and the timeframe is sufficiently long that there is room for
choice. The problem discussed here conforms to all five of the
conditions. In time, better technology will enable more and
research will show us what works, what doesnÕt, and why, but
what this technology will entail cannot be foreseen. It is also the
case here that simply relying on technology is not enough.
Acceptance, cooperation and participation of learners to achieve
the second scenario are also necessary and achieving this hinges on
at least two factors, namely achieving a certain degree of
motivation in the learners / participants in the OER-community to
work with and for each other and avoiding the situation where the
transaction costs of using the system (Ciborra & Olson, 1988)
become so high that these learners lose motivation once they have
begun.

Backcasting starts from a set of non-overlapping principles of,
in our case, a sustainable open online learning community. The two
principles mentioned above (motivation and transaction costs) are
used in the research described here. There are other important
principles which are not used for various reasons. The quality and
correctness of the learning content provided is not used as a
target principle because we assume that the materials provided
(parts of existing distance learning courses) are of sufficient
quality for unproblematic use in our current research. Another
important principle is the quality and fit of the educational
support provided in the materials. Although it might be argued (as
we do in our conclusions) that the lack of teacher support in an
open learning community will often require adaptation of the
learning materials for the OpenER project it was decided to provide
the materials as is. A third important principle we did not use if
the need for trust a learner should have in the learning community
to start using it. In our case we assumed that because the OpenER
courses are provided officially by the Open Universiteit Nederland
which is known for good quality learning materials, lack of trust
should not be an important issue. This might very well change when
we move from small 25 hours try-out courses to longer study times.
Additional measures will be required to make the learner join our
learning community.

Lack of externalmotivation to help others is
often a major problem in forming such communities (online self
organising social systems; Wiley & Edwards, 2002). Helping
others takes time and effort, and the rewards, other than internal
and intrinsic feelings of satisfaction, are often not readily
available. Community members must be willing to help others, and
relying on intrinsic motivation and/or altruism is not enough. To
make an open online learning-community successful, membership must
be both attractive and rewarding.

Attractiveness and rewards can be achieved in different ways.
One way is by simply making the answer available in the sense that
learners experience that asking questions is followed by the
receipt of an answer. In the first scenario, Carol wanted to post
something, but this was not attractive because she felt that no-one
else would profit by it since she didnÕt profit by asking a
question (i.e., she had received no answers). This is related to
achieving a sense of relatedness (i.e., belongingness or
connectedness with others). This construct has quite often been
demonstrated (e.g., Ryan & Deci, 2000; see also Furrer &
Skinner, 2003 for an overview) to have a positive impact on
intrinsic motivation, and thus on engagement and persistence.
Relatedness is characterized by fulfilment and involvement with the
social world. This social aspect affects relatedness by creating a
climate or culture of trust, respect, caring, concern, and a sense
of community with others. In a related area Kreijns and Kirschner
(2004) have studied the role of this social interaction in
collaborative learning. They show that the existence of a sound
social space - the network of social relationships amongst the
group members embedded in group structures of norms and values,
rules and roles, beliefs and ideals - is essential for reinforcing
social interaction. A social space is «sound« if it is
characterized by affective work relationships, strong group
cohesiveness, trust, respect and belonging, satisfaction, and a
strong sense of community (cf. Rourke, 2000; Rovai, 2001). The
second is allowing for contributors, and especially good
contributors, to receive the recognition that they deserve.
Recognition-seekers are motivated when answers that they have given
are rated so they can earn what could be called Õexpert
pointsÕ. Other recognition-seekers could be rewarded through
assistance in developing a personal/professional network by
becoming a member of an Ôinner circleÕ with the more
advanced students, alumnae, or experts. To kick-start a learning
community, prior learners or even traditional students can
participate for rewards. By setting a good example, participation
by others is stimulated. This is related to the construct of
perceived competence, the whole complex of beliefs about
oneÕs own competences and as such is highly related to
self-esteem, the evaluation of oneÕs self-concept. According
to Harter (1990), perceived competence is an important
psychological mediator of achievement behaviour and motivation
among children and adolescents in the academic domain and has often
been demonstrated to affect intrinsic motivation.

In a correlational study, children's self-reported perceptions
of academic competence and personal control were found to be
positively related to their intrinsic interest in schoolwork and
preference for challenging school activities (Boggiano, Main, &
Katz, 1988). Competence can be perceived through praise, through
comparisons with other students or other indications of good
performance or through meaningful effort (e.g., Henderlong &
Lepper, 2002). Objective mastery praise has been shown to be better
than social comparisons in affecting motivation (Henderlong,
Tomlinson, & Stanton, 2004).

The concept of transaction costs is more and more used in the
field of learning and instruction (Ciborra & Olson, 1988;
Kirschner, Paas, & Kirschner, In press; Yamane, 1996). It
originates from the field of economics, and concerns those costs,
other than the direct financial costs, that are incurred in trading
goods or services. Within a collaborative or cooperative learning
environment, for example, these transaction costs are Òthe
costs of setting up, enforcing, and maintaining the reciprocal
obligations, or contracts, that keep the members of a team together
[and]Érepresent the ÒoverheadÓ of the
teamÉlinked to the resources (time, skills, etc.) employed
to allow a work team to produce more than the sum of its
partsÓ (Ciborra & Olson, p. 95). In our situation, they
refer to the specific extra acts and costs that have to be taken
into account when that a learner must carry out when studying,
communicating with other learners and coordinating both their own
learning and the communication between each other.

4 The OpenER project

In December 2006 the Open Universiteit Nederland launched OpenER
(Open Educational Resources), aimed at increasing and broadening
participation in Higher Education by lifelong learners. The
high-quality OpenER learning materials which are freely accessible
on the web is based upon the fact that they were - for the most
part - originally designed for accredited university level
independent study in informal learning settings, with no references
to or need for a teacher, classroom or educational institution.
Traditional barriers that may inhibit potential learners from
taking part in ÔnormalÕ courses at the Open
Universiteit Nederland such as the costs that may be incurred have
been removed, while certain aspects of studying at the Open
Universiteit Nederland that facilitate learning such as the
availability of online and/or face-to-face tutoring and study
centres have also been removed. The compact OpenER courses (i.e.,
25 hours of individual study as opposed to 100 or 200 hour
traditional courses) can be studied by any individual and can be
(re)used by any educational institution for non-commercial
purposes, without any charge. Almost 500 000 unique users visited
the site since the start in December 2006 with 12% of the visitors
returning to the site. A survey under 800 visitors showed that most
visitors were interested in taking a free course (79%), testing
their abilities to take up a university study (32%) or trying a
study at the Open Universiteit Nederland (44%). Only 5% of the
visitors were interested in reusing the learning materials for
their own courses.

One of the ideas behind OpenER is to offer an easy and
attractive entry portal to higher education. The OpenER learning
materials may be just glanced at, or read intensively, or studied
systematically according to oneÕs needs, anywhere, anytime,
anyhow, any long. This learning experience may lead to
(re)establishment of self-esteem, (re)generation of motivation,
(re)discovery of pleasure with learning, and (re)assessment of
oneÕs learning capacity. It may therefore tempt individuals
in the informal learning context to make subsequent steps to
signing up for a study in the formal educational system. One of the
targets of OpenER is this conversion rate to amount to
approximately five percent.

A unique characteristic is the option of a formal test for some
of the OpenER courses, resulting in credits for the Open
Universiteit NederlandÕs Bachelor programmes. Informal
learning can, thus, be smoothly transitioned into formal learning.
At the moment a formal test is possible for 5 of the 22 courses
offered. The costs of a test are Û 50 for which the student
can try the test twice. When passing the test the student gets a
certificate worth 1 EC. Over the past six months we received 71
requests for such a test. Only 21 individuals took the test of
which 17 passed and 4 failed. We have the impression that the main
reason for taking the formal test is to check whether one would be
capable to start a study at university level.

The materials vary from static PDF files through combinations
with web pages to fully interactive web-based courses. As mentioned
before, there is no support given by the institution to the users
of these materials. We will however create opportunities for other
users to give peer support.

5 Forum XL

Online forums are often used for asynchronous communication in
educational and/or learning situations. The current uses of and
possibilities for forums have the problems that were sketched in
the scenario. In general, online forums can be useful in situations
where learners need information, advice, feedback or even practical
information that peers who are working on with the same materials
could provide. But when the nature of the support needed requires
tutoring or assessment acts or behaviours by a more experienced or
knowledgeable learner, another mechanism is required. There is no
reason for the experienced learners to actively participate in
forums where novices ask their questions. The transaction costs of
accessing forum software that is external to the learning materials
is already high and if you have to do that several times in order
to get the information wanted it will very soon become too high.
Many fora associated with OER remain empty or lack recent posts
which make visiting them spooky and certainly not motivating.

Forum XL alleviates this by:

1. extending the forum software to have it immediately send
the questions that have been posed to expert volunteers whose
replies are then sent to the questioner and added to the forum. If
no expert reacts quickly enough, if the expert makes known that
she/he does not have the required expertise, or if the questioner
indicates that the answer to the question was insufficient, then it
is resent to other experts. This immediacysolves many of the
sketched problems

2. making it rewarding to provide answers which is achieved
through the provision of ÔstatusÕ (e.g., kudos) for
the answerer or by allowing for the giving of quality ratings to
the answers.

Two procedures need to be made operational to implement Forum
XL. The first takes care of acquiring a reservoir of experts; the
second the question-answering.

The first step in trying to find the experts is to define what
kind of expert and what range of expertise is needed. Sometimes it
is best to have learners working actively on the same course, but
just one or two steps ahead of others while at other times it is
better to have learners who have recently completed the course. The
second step is to approach the potential experts with a
proposition. It is important to be clear about all relevant
aspects: ÒHow much work does participation entail?,
ÒFor how long?Ó, ÒWhat is the reward?Ó,
ÒWho are the learners?Ó The experts who agree to
become a part of Forum XL fill in a form about their expertise and
the way in which they want to work (e.g., how many questions per
week they are willing to answer, whether e-mail follow-up requests
on the answers given are allowed or not, etc.). This information is
stored in the expert database.

Now the real work begins, namely answering the questions. The
following figure depicts this process.

A visitor to Forum XL poses a question in the forum. Along with
the ÒusualÓ information (i.e., title and content of
the posting), information is added on the domain of the question.
Sometimes this occurs automatically (e.g., there is a (sub)forum
for each course and the course name is used to indicate a specific
area of expertise) and sometimes the person asking the question has
to manually indicate the domain of expertise required. In the rest
of this article, the learner who poses a question is called the
question-owner.

Step 2: The question is e-mailed to a random
selection of x candidates

After placing the question in the forum, an automated process
randomly selects a number of candidates to answer the question from
the set available for the domain. Each candidate receives an
e-mail. In an HTML-formatted e-mail, the candidate can respond to
the question. This response is placed in the forum as well as sent
directly to the question owner. When no HTML-formatted e-mail can
be used, the e-mail contains a web link to a web form with the same
functionality as the HTML-formatted e-mail. The e-mail to the
candidate also contains the urgency of the question, an option to
reject answering the question (i.e., ÒnoÓ, Òno
time availableÓ, Ònot enough experienceÓ) and
a score card of the candidate (i.e., Òyou have answered n of
m questions with a mean satisfaction score of zÓ).

Step 3a No answer within y days?

When no satisfactory answer has been returned within a set
number of days, a new random selection of experts is made to which
the question is then sent.

Step 3b Judging the answer

When an answer is given, the question-owner judges whether the
answer given has helped her or him and can also rate the answer
given. The rating can be made visible in the forum and can be added
to the Òscore cardÓ of the person who has given the
answer. When a person has satisfactorily answered a predetermined
number of questions with a predetermined mean in ratings she or he
can be made visible in the forum as an ÒexpertÓ, a
Òpreferred userÓ or some such similar
qualification.[1]

The answer is also sent to the other candidates who had received
the original e-mail containing the question. It is possible that an
e-mail exchange will then start between the question-owner and the
person who has provided the answer, though this will occur only
when the answer-owner has indicated in his or her profile that she
or he is open for this possibility. The other candidates can then
decide to delete the question since it has been answered, or they
can choose to provide additional information or directly contact
the answer-owner or question-owner or both by e-mail.

At the moment (April 2008) Forum XL is not yet linked to the
real OpenER courses. This will take place mid 2008 when a large
scale experiment using several courses and expert groups will
begin. A small scale experiment as part of a workshop has shown
that the ideas behind Forum XL were appealing to both learners and
experts.

Although Forum XL was designed to help solve problems
encountered by learners in an OER, the tool itself is fairly
generic. The same tool can be used for different purposes, such as
answering questions, giving feedback on performance, giving an
assessment of a product or even of a peer tutoring interaction.

6 Looking over the shoulder

A typical alternative for asking questions is looking over a
fellow-learnerÕs shoulder. This, however, is not possible
online but we can make the annotations a student makes available to
fellow learners. The first step in this direction we made is to
record information from a limited study-group on answers to
exercises/questions, their reflections on the material, the notes
that they might leave and the summaries that they might make and
then to make this available to the whole group. The effect we hope
to achieve is to prevent demotivation in cases where a learner gets
stuck. Just by pressing a button the learner gets access to the
annotations other learners made in the same place in the learning
material (low transaction costs).

This support has already been provided in two of the OpenER
courses in PDF format. The course documents contain the notes from
between five and eight fellow students. Notes can be made visible
or invisible or only a subset of the notes can be made visible. A
learner can also add his or her own notes or he/she can comment on
the notes that are already there. At the moment, these self-made
additions are only available to the individual learner and not to
other learners. Figures 2 and 3 illustrate how this looks in the
course.

Fig. 2. Snapshot of part of the PDF document of the course on
ÒReading literatureÓ. Student annotations are
combined in one document. Each student has a separate colour. The
content of an annotation becomes visible when mousing over or
clicking on an annotation symbol.

Fig. 3 One annotation is used by the student to
introduce herself.

Comments and notes are created using the email based review
mechanism available in Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional¨ (http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatpro/
). Students who volunteer to provide comments are sent the PDFs for
annotation. The comments sent by several contributors are combined
in one PDF that others can open and see.

Experimental data are being gathered at the moment. Students who
studied the OpenER courses on ÒReading LiteratureÓ
and ÒInvestingÓ are provided with a PDF based course
which included the annotation of fellow students. After they
studied the documents, they were asked to fill in a short
evaluation questionnaire. At the moment we have only some
qualitative feedback from a hands-on workshop suggesting
annotations might be helpful during some phases of study, but may
be distracting at other times. This suggests that it is important
to be able to easily show and hide the comments.

The annotation sharing mechanism we used is expected to become
available for all types of digital content. We think the annotation
mechanism can be called a low hanging fruit because the overhead of
providing access to notes made during study is very low while the
potential benefit of immediate access to notes made by peers when a
student gets stuck is large.

If our research shows that making annotations available is
useful, a broader server-based mechanism can be set up covering all
PDF-based courses. All students will be able to share their
annotations, but also to comment on the annotations made by others.
Technically all of this is already possible for html-based courses
(see e.g. Fleck or
Diigo) and with tools such as
D3E, Ubiquitous
D3E, and the PDF Annotation
Engine. When these tools become more stable annotation support
can be extended to html-based courses.

7 Conclusions

Taking a backcasting perspective has brought some interesting
practical research problems to tackle. The project is evaluating an
email-based extension to standard online forums that could solve
the problem of lack of participation to forums supplied with Open
Educational Resources. The software used in the experiments here
will be obsolete in ten years. But if we find mechanisms that
improve peer-support in an open online learning community, then
these can easily be used in future learning systems.

The current OpenER setup tries to improve peer support using
extensions of online forums but still relies on volunteers offering
support to fellow learners with no other reward than a thank-you, a
place in the gallery of fame or a kudo. In many situations this
might fall short. An alternative might be to make providing peer
support part of the regular learning process. In most professions
being competent in assessing, supporting, collaborating with and
giving feedback to peers is regarded as important. It seems obvious
that a win-win situation arises when education is designed taking
into account that some students need support, feedback or to be
assessed while others need practice in providing support, feedback
or assessment. Unfortunately educational research in this direction
is rare (Sluijsmans (2006) being one of the exceptions). Software
tools supporting these kinds of learning processes with peer
support exist (e.g. Espace, Volder (2007)) but require teacher
involvement.

The same can be said about the experiments with sharing
annotations. In our current experiment we only added a tool for
sharing annotations but a better solution might require both an
annotation tool and (hopefully minor) adaptations of the learning
materials themselves.

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[1] Not
only is giving good answers a skill, but asking good questions
might also require training. Research shows that effective help
seekers ask precise questions, persist in seeking help, and apply
the explanations received; effective help givers provide detailed
explanations of the material as well as opportunities for help
recipients to apply the help received, and monitor student
understanding. (Webb & Mastergeorge, 2003). We hope to cover
this point by providing new Forum XL users with some examples of
good use and some exercises on question formulation.